Regional review of payments for watershed services: Sub-Saharan Africa

Although there has been global experimentation with Payments for Watershed Service (PWS) schemes for almost a decade, only a couple of schemes exist in Africa. The two African PWS programs that are currently making payments are both located in South Africa. As described below, these two programs have characteristics that are unusual when compared to PWS schemes in Latin America and Asia: they are essentially public works programs oriented towards securing hydrologic services. Given that the most common definitions of Payments for Environmental Services (PES) in the literature do not include such public works programs (e.g., Wunder, 2007; Ferraro, 2001), one could reasonably argue that there are no PWS schemes currently operating in Africa.